A swine flu party sounds fun, but I'll stick to the wine flu

The hottest guests in town are suffering from H1N1.Photo: WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images

By Bryony Gordon

6:40PM BST 01 Jul 2009

It's my birthday this weekend. I am going to have a party, to celebrate exactly what I do not know. Managing to keep myself alive for another year, against all the odds? Being one step closer to 30, the age at which women officially become desperate and undesirable (according to a bloke I know who is 40, with a receding hairline and a paunch)? Or because when someone asks what you're doing for your birthday, responding with "Having a party" sounds better than just saying "Crying"?

Anyway, this do. I have a venue. I have some alcohol. I have amazing party snacks such as Wotsits, iced gems, and cheese and pineapple hedgehogs. I have Party Poppers and streamers. I have games that we can play, such as "Who will be the first person to fall over?" and "Who will be the last one standing?", the prize being a bottle of Blue Nun (if we haven't drunk it all).

It will, I'm sure you'll agree, be an absolute whizz of a party. But it seems there is something missing. And that something is someone with swine flu.

It used to be that a party was not a party unless you had Kate Moss in attendance, or those sisters who look like they need a really good scrub (I think their surname is Geldof). But now the hottest guests in town – quite literally – are people suffering from H1N1.

According to the BBC, swine flu parties are sweeping the nation like, well, swine flu. The idea is that if you catch it now, when it is relatively mild, you might be immune when the disease mutates and has the power to wipe out half of the planet. A bit like chicken pox parties, only newer and cooler.

Related Articles

It's had an interesting trajectory, swine flu, hasn't it? It's gone from something we were all terribly keen to shun to something we all want to get our hands on – like Take That, or those Eighties wet-look leggings everybody seems to be sporting. Last week, a friend called and said that his brother was being tested for it, and we all got so terribly excited that we were quite disappointed when the doctor told him he had nothing more than a cold. His cachet dropped instantly.

But the British Medical Association has cautioned against swine flu parties, and the more I think about it, the less the idea appeals. For a start, nobody has the foggiest about how the disease will mutate, and whether catching it now will protect us when (or if) it does. Also, I have this feeling that the last thing someone running a fever is going to want to do is attend a party. But my main concern is that the next day, how do we tell the difference between the symptoms of swine flu, and those of good old-fashioned wine flu?

...

I went to the Glastonbury festival last weekend, where three people were diagnosed with the virus and sent home. Frankly, camping for four days, with overflowing lavatories and little or no access to showers, I'm surprised the figure was not higher.

Then again, in those conditions, swine flu is the least of your worries. What I want to know is how many people came back with trench foot, or having had full-on psychotic episodes similar to Jack Nicholson's in The Shining? Having seen the thousand-yard stares on the final day – and in some cases, the open sobbing – I'm thinking it must be at least four figures.

...

Finally, this week sees the second birthday of the smoking ban. Isn't it incredible how quickly we've grown to love something we once saw as a gross affront to our civil liberties? It's helped us smokers to cut down, and pubs smell, if not better, then at least different.

Best of all, I think, is that we can now tell the difference between the dull people at a drinking establishments (those sitting inside by themselves, looking after their friends' pints) and the interesting ones (those outside, smoking).